John Banville Quotes

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

It’s great people still care about books, and it’s great you can still fashion a life from literature.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?

I’ve always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

I don’t own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that’s all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It’s true. You get the thing done, but you don’t actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.